The Pain Merchants. Janice Hardy

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       Chapter One

      Stealing eggs is a lot harder than stealing the whole chicken. With chickens, you just grab a hen, stuff her in a sack and make your escape. But for eggs, you have to stick your hand under a sleeping bird. Chickens don’t like this. They wake all spooked and start pecking holes in your arm, or your face if it’s close. And they squawk something terrible.

      The trick is to wake the chicken first, then go for the eggs. I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to figure this out.

      “Good morning, little hen,” I sang softly. The chicken blinked awake and cocked her head at me. She didn’t get to squawking, just flapped her wings a bit as I lifted her off the nest; she’d soon settle down once I tucked her under my arm. I’d overheard that trick from a couple of boys I’d unloaded fish with last week.

      A voice came from beside me. “Don’t move.”

      Two words I didn’t want to hear with someone else’s chicken under my arm.

      I froze. The chicken didn’t. Her scaly feet flailed towards the eggs that should have been my breakfast. I looked up to see a cute night guard not much older than me, perhaps sixteen. The night was more humid than usual, but a slight breeze blew his sandpale hair. A soldier’s cut, but a month or two grown out.

      Stay calm; stay alert. As Grannyma used to say, if you’re caught with the cake, you might as well offer them a piece. Not sure how that applied to chickens though.

      “Join me for breakfast when your shift ends?” I asked. Sunrise was two hours away.

      The guard smiled, but aimed his rapier at my chest anyway. Was nice to have a handsome boy smile at me in the moonlight, but his was a sad, sorry-only-doing-my-job smile. I’d learned to tell the difference between smiles a lot faster than I’d figured out the egg thing.

      “So, Heclar,” he said over his shoulder, “you do have a thief. Guess I was wrong.”

      Rancher Heclar strutted into view, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the chicken trying to peck me—ruffled, sharp beaked and beady-eyed. He harrumphed and set his fists against his hips. “I told you crocodiles weren’t getting them.”

      “I’m no chicken thief,” I said quickly.

      “Then what’s that?” The night guard flicked his rapier tip towards the chicken and smiled again. Friendlier this time, but his deep brown eyes had twitched when he bent his wrist.

      “A chicken.” I blew a stray feather off my chin and peered closer. His knuckles were white from too tight a grip on so light a weapon. That had to mean joint pain, maybe even knuckleburn, though he was far СКАЧАТЬ